At least in some other parts of the world (e.g. Germany), you cannot copyright a recipe. You can have a copyright on a photo that you publish with the recipe, but the recipe itself can be copied and redistributed. The reason is that text without enough level of creativity ("Schaffenshoehe") cannot be copyrighted.

Well...
Intellectual works aren't the sort of things that can be public domain or not, but rather they might or might not be in the public domain. However that said, yes, all intellectual works on the web are in fact in the public domain, although what is at issue here is whether or not they are in the public domain in law. Not every road that exists in law exists in fact, and vice versa, and this applies to works being in the public domain too.

There's only so far that this paradoxical duality of private and public property rights can be carried. Ultimately as technology stretches the current legal, social and philosophical landscape to its limit, something will have to give.

The essential issue here is not the recipe or where it was gleaned from. The central issue is that perhaps only 2 or 3 kilobytes of data is being protected by a strong legal monopoly, in perpetuity, without any formal notice, contract, or written agreement of any kind, and fur

You were using a meaning of the term external to the domain of this discussion either to purposely confuse the issue to benefit an agenda, or just to be jackass.

In the context of copyright law 'public domain' has a very specific meaning which has nothing to do with being 'publically available.' Using other (dubious) meanings of 'public domain' in this conversation is being willfully obtuse.

I remember back in "The Days" (tm) when people believed that the sole role of copyright was to help the diffusion of ideas. At this time, when the first contents became available to the net, people thought that finally, all human knowledge would be shared by everyone and that gimmicks such as copyright would soon become useless. Well I guess it was a dream...

Copyright is about whether or not a person has a right to make a copy of something. By downloading a song, you are creating a new copy. If you are not given the right to do this, it is copyright infringement.

Whether or not the concept of copyright is beneficial to society is a completely different argument, and I personally agree that the current limits on length of copyright need to be revisited. However, downloading music that is still under copyright without the copyright holder's permission is blatant copyright infringement, and a violation of the law.

With at least one case going on the idea of "Did the person downloading know that they did not have permission from the copyright owner?" (The jury declared yes, and ergo it was infringement.)

What, in the US? If so, that'd be damned odd. In the US, copyright infringement is almost invariably a matter of strict liability; there can be infringement even if you had no idea, and could not have reasonably had any idea, and had no intent to infringe. Kind of like speeding, or statutory rape. The penalties can be

In any event, no: downloading files is not presumed to be legal, and in all cases the plaintiff must prove that the defendant's behavior was improper (lack of a license being a factor). Usually though, it's fairly clear cut as to whether there was a license -- an express or implied license to download being the most common ways that it is legal to download anything -- that the issue can be stipulated to so that no one has to waste time with it.

No. A copy is defined in the law as a tangible object within which a work is fixed. It isn't possible to download tangible objects. If we could, that would be the end of the postal system. The tangible object in the case of downloading is the downloader's computer's hard drive, or RAM, or whatnot. And since the download didn't magically make itself happen, but was initiated by the downloader sending a request to the server, it is the downloader who is liable for infringement for the download. And the uploader for serving the file to the downloader.

The cases that are brought are selected and structured as they are for merely tactical reasons. Uploaders are easier to find and gather evidence about. A person who only downloads -- a leech -- is harder to find, much less prove liable. Plus, if there were no more uploaders, the downloaders would go away on their own, but this does not really work vice versa. Thus, it is a better use of resources to go after uploaders. Going after the networks themselves is better still (which is why the first lawsuits were against entities like Napster), but they have gotten a lot slipperier.

It is not the downloader who *authorises* or *creates* the copy. It is the distributor. A downloader only ever *requests* a copy of a resource - they can never force a distributor to give them one. It is the distributor's decision how to, or even whether to, respond to a request.

But it isn't as though the server is going to push a file on to your computer without your involvement in some way. While it doesn't have to respond to your request, you do have to make a request. And since a typical server is basic

"okay" is not a very precise term. "Morally right" or "morally wrong" might be better.

I think that downloading copyrighted material is largely amoral. It might be immoral if you would have paid for it had the ability to download it not been available.

I think that taking someone else's work and providing it to someone else falls on the immoral side most of the time--you can't know whether or not that person would have purchased the work if you had not given it to them.

There's also the startling hypocrisy of the corporations, both in the actions themselves and the penalties applied. The same politicians and companies who push for bankruptcy-inducing fines and hugely invasive tracking are then caught infringing copyright themselves, but continue to operate as if nothing happened.

As someone who works in media, I'm not one who agrees with the "It's OK to pirate as long as you don't sell it" philosophy. Perhaps I'm in the/. minority, but I don't have any pirated software/media on my computer.

Now I'm not here to be on a high horse and tell the pirates how much they suck even if I thought that, which I don't. And I'm certainly not going to defend the RIAA, which needs to be smacked down hard.

Is piracy copyright infringement? Yes. You can come up with all the justifications you want about how it's not stealing. And you're right. It's not. It's copyright infringement, and I do think that people deserve to be paid for their work. I don't work for free at my job, and I don't expect you to work for free either, even if you record a song I really want to put on my mp3 player. No matter how you justify it, it's still wrong, just like I'm wrong when I speed even though I justify it by saying that everyone else is doing it.

Copyright infringement is wrong, and illegal. Should the RIAA be allowed to direct the prosecution of pirates? No. Should they be allowed to have what amounts to their own police force that conducts raids to catch the pirates? Certainly not. Should you be fined 65 grand per file? Hell no. They sell them for a buck. You owe them a buck. You then owe damages totaling whatever your state's damages for a misdemeanor are set to as your punishment. This is all gonna amount to around 500 bucks at worst. That's plenty. It's a deterrent without being ridiculously over the top.

But my original point stands. Piracy is wrong. It's more wrong to turn around and sell what you pirated. It's even more wrong to do it and then suggest that the creator of the content owes you money for the privilege of having her work stolen and published without permission.

just like I'm wrong when I speed even though I justify it by saying that everyone else is doing it.

You should get a better analogy. Exceeding the speed limit because everyone else is also speeding is right in the one objective sense that matters - reduction of harm. It is pretty well understood that speed differentials between cars on the same road are a significant road hazard, even when in different lanes like fast moving HOVs beside slow-moving regular lanes. So while speeding because others are speeding is unlawful (in most, but not all US states) it is generally the right thing to do.

Keeping your speed to the legal limit, while putting you personally at greater risk, encourages others to reduce their speed.

It isn't about your personal risk, its about the risk to all of the other cars around you. One guy hits the slowpoke and the chain reaction can easily take out 10 cars.

The excessive speed itself is dangerous, and matching that speed encourages those around you to do the same.

Not the case. DoT standards for setting speed limits, in a nutshell, are to use the 85th percentile of what unregulated drivers average on the roadway. This process works because people rarely drive faster than is dangerous regardless (and/or in spite) of posted speed limits.

The analogy is appropriate, in spite of whatever justifications you like to make for your illegal speeding habits.

I personally would hold them responsible for a buck for each and every copy that was distributed. That could easily amount to thousands of dollars, but not likely hundreds of thousands except for cases of blatant and flagrant infringement (like running a well-known server that distributes all the music you can find). It would also be difficult to quantify, which is why they have the ridiculous dollar amount on the punishment.

I find it hard to believe that 80,000 people copied each of the 24 songs Jamie Th

It can. Any otherwise infringing use can be a fair use, though no use is necessarily a fair use. Whether any given use is fair or not depends on the overall circumstances. There's a four-part test that the courts commonly employ, and while the amount of the use is a factor, it isn't determinative all by itself.

For example, the Supreme Court felt that videotaping an entire movie from the television, so that it could be watched later -- a com

There is actually precedent that has determined that recipes--at least, lists of ingredients and/or instructions for preparing them--are not copyrightable. Point of interest, but jokes are not copyrightable also. (Though a specific performance of those jokes can be.)

We live in a society with two sets of rules. They basically boil down to this: if a big guy does it to a little guy, it's okay. If a little guy does it to a big guy, the little guy is gonna get stomped. That is the real American Dream: to become an Important Person, so you can play by the more advantageous set of rules and tell the little people what to do.

Humans love justice. We are social creatures, and in order for society to work, people must play by the same set of rules. When they do not, our innate and genetically determined sense of social justice kicks in. Almost all humans feel a desire to act fairly towards others, and to punish those who do not act fairly, even if punishing the other harms ourselves.

Revenge is just a rather crude form of justice. It satisfies the instinct to punish unfairness. But there are more elegant and less harmful ways of ac

Right, but the country started out with the express intention of NOT having two sets of rules. So I feel it is important to point out that we have failed in that respect, so that we may attempt to correct our failure and hold everyone accountable in the same way.

When a large number of people are more concerned with the welfare of billionaires than the people living on the street, there's little that can be done, and no system of government has ever found a solution to it.

Admittedly in most parts of the world, the lower classes aren't nearly as ignorant of their own self interest as in America.

Patent and copyright law need not be the "only things". They're only a means. There are other ways.

Those laws for the little people have been turned against us. They should go. In fact, 1 century ago big entertainment fought against copyright. They wanted to be able to use songs without paying for them. When they figured out they could instead own the songs, leveraging their advantages to obtain them for next to nothing, they changed their (ahem) tune.

Rather frequently, criminals gain control of a victim's weapon, using it against the owner. That's what patent and copyright feels like today. But because it's our knife, somehow we can't bear to part with it. We get ourselves robbed and stabbed, over and over, with our own weapons. Then the survivors among us watch helplessly while the mobsters use the take to put on a magnificent show of being successful citizens, wearing the best suits our money can buy, and hiring the best lawyers to get them out of trouble.

The outrage is because the rules aren't being applied equitably (which is NOT the same as equally). It is unacceptable to allow a publisher to steal material from another but have that same publisher sue others for doing likewise. Freedom has to be a two-way street.

(For those wondering about the difference between equal and equitable, the quotation people usually refer to regarding one law for the rich and another for the poor continues "neither are permitted to steal bread or sleep under bridges". Technically, that is equal. But since the rich do not need to do either, it is not equitable.)

Looking into this - they didn't just take her recipe. Bad summary as usual. They took her article, and they've apparently done this many times. They could easily be pushed to bankruptcy by the lawsuits coming their way, and that idiotic email is going to be the first exhibit at every one of them.

Is Slashdot on the side of the company or the author? Copyright law is constantly described as being "broken" around here, and posters are often on the side of music pirates and other pro-piracy entities, like Pirate Bay and the Pirate Party.

I suspect, however, that because a company made the violation, people will side with the author. Which suggests that it's really more about anti-corporatism than anti-copyright, which explains why people get up in arms over GPL code theft despite the double standard (the GPL is a copyright license).

Is Slashdot on the side of the company or the author? Copyright law is constantly described as being "broken" around here, and posters are often on the side of music pirates and other pro-piracy entities, like Pirate Bay and the Pirate Party.

Neither. Copyright law isn't as broke as the justice system that overcompensates for infringement. The infringee in this case asked for $130 donation to a college, a very reasonable sum. Patent law is broken, but the only problem with copyright isn't the concept. Copyright laws are what prevent Cisco from just lifting the Linux kernel and using it without contributing back the changes. Copyright laws themselves are not bad and protect authors. It is the idea that a corporation can own a copyright and have it extended into infinity (See Disney). Or infringement can be punished with a financial death sentence (See RIAA). Even those that pirate aren't against copyrights. Hell, they just don't care.

What is exceptional is that the magazine publisher had come to the conclusion that everything on the internets was public domain. That clearly indicates that they likely have an entire business built on infringing copyrights. Using other peoples work to make a profit. This is very different than hitting thepiratebay to get a copy of Stargate Universe.

As for Disney extending copyright on Mickey Mouse, why shouldn't they be allowed to do that if they're still making money off of Mickey Mouse? I've never heard a convincing argument why Mickey Mouse should be taken away from them if he's still a viable property. The original copyright lengths were decided in an era before long-term mass media, and laws change to reflect changing circumstances.

And what's the convincing argument that copyright should be extended to a period long enough to protect Disney's assets? Why should they retain exclusive cultural domain over something Walt Disney created over 80 years ago? "Because they can make money from it" is not a sufficient reason in my opinion.

It seems to me that there has to be a reasonable limit. The protections of copyright exist to provide incentive to creators to make new work, to give them the protections they need to profit from it. But if an artwork rises in prominence to the point where it is well remembered a lifetime later - I think that's beyond what any single company should have the ability to control. That's a cultural institution.

Without some kind of hard limit, exclusivity extends perpetually, and culture itself becomes a thing subject to domination by those with the greatest back-catalog of assets. Any new work becomes subject to scrutiny: does this new song use any bits of melody that can be traced back to another artist's work? The barest traces of influence become grounds to demand tribute to the media god who, in times scarcely remembered, created something that happened to turn out to be a hit. There has to be a limit. And of course there is a limit, except for the fact that they keep changing it every time it threatens Disney's assets.

I don't want a system that so heavily favors established powers. New players should have the power to create without fear of being litigated out of existence because they were influenced by a piece of work that influenced a huge chunk of the world's population for generations.

Soul Music was born when Ray Charles ripped off a gospel song by re-wording it. The gospel song he ripped off was a re-working of a prior gospel song. The original gospel songs were verbatim copies hymns set to new music.

At the time, none of this was copyright infringement. The song Ray Charles ripped off was never registered, and the copyright on the hymns upon which gospel was founded had expired.

With today's laws it would all be infringement. Hell the hymns would only just now b

The thing is, even if copyrights expired after a month, Mickey Mouse would still be protected. While the films, TV shows, comics, games, etc. that he appears in are covered by copyright, the distinctive visual character is protected by trademarks. Trademarks are theoretically infinite in duration, provided they remain in use.

Really, a ten-year, maybe twenty-year copyright term should suffice. Is Universal making money off of Back to the Future III still? Is Fox still getting money from Die Hard 2? Is Ninte

The Constitution is clear. The purpose of copyright is not profit, but innovation. Extending a copyright after the maker has died can't spur innovation, and thus the law doing so must be unconstitutional.

The original copyright lengths were decided in an era before long-term mass media, and laws change to reflect changing circumstances.

Here, we agree. It's so much easier to bring something to market and make your profit quickly, the limits should be about 1/10th what they were when the Constitution wa

Copyright is an exception to people's natural right to copy objects in their possession. For example, if you buy a new chair there is no law that prohibits you from buying a bunch of wood, going out to the 'ole woodshop and making three more chairs exactly like it.

The obvious limiting factor there, though, is that not many people have the skill necessary to duplicate those chairs. Thus the carpenter can earn a living by selling chairs.

"As for Disney extending copyright on Mickey Mouse, why shouldn't they be allowed to do that if they're still making money off of Mickey Mouse?"

Because they are stealing from the public. They fact they are still making money on it makes it worse, not better. When the copyright to the first Mickey Mouse movie was granted in 1928, the deal was that they would get sole ability to profit from it for about 50 years, and then it would belong to citizens of the US en masse. They reneged on that deal and stole from

The Statute of Anne [wikipedia.org] was passed in 1710, three hundred years ago, and formed the foundation of US copyright law, with some sections used verbatim. This Statute stipulated copyright terms of 14 years, renewable for a second 14 if the author was still alive. Within this broader context, it seems clear that the concept of a limited copyright term meant "limited" in terms of something within a human scale, and, importantly, bounded by the life of the original author. Instead, what we have now is a de facto unlimited copyright term, with copyrights held not by the original author, but rather by faceless and essentially immortal corporations.

Bringing up 5000 years as a "limited" copyright term, while pedantically correct, is completely irrelevant within this context of copyright on a human scale. And, within this context, Disney (among many others) has egregiously overstepped any morally or historically defensible bounds.

Copyright law is constantly described as being "broken" around here...

If you take training in business communications, you come across this notion of the 10 minute reader, the 3 minute reader, and the 1 minute reader, although I think the pyramid has undergone an increase in pay grade or two since the advent of Twitter (the one minute reader, the 10 second reader, and the 3 second reader). If you think the voices around here complaining about copyright are some kind of consensus, you've yet to discover word wrap. Yours is three-second reader daily digest.

Among the three-minute readers, copyright is considered a cornerstone of the intellectual property economy. Complaints have more to do with the current implementation, starting with the Mickey Mouse copyright extension act, and extending to predatory enforcement by RIAA and the MPAA, including the collection of revenue on blank media.

Among the ten-minute readers, there are acknowledgments that services such as Google Books change the parameters of the copyright act as it used to exist (when it was reasonably balanced), and issues about the ownership and generativity of culture in the form of mash-ups and parody. There are no clear answers to these questions yet. It's a work in progress, and the ground is still shifting under our feet.

I watched "Control Room" last night. An extra feature interview tells the story about a conversation with some smart-ass Arab cab driver (possibly an under-employed physicist) in a country other than Iraq where the cab driver acknowledged that not everyone was happy with their own statuary, and suggesting that Iraq option would be just fine, if perhaps "we could skip the bombing and go straight to the looting". This is the attitude of people who think that the current implementation of copyright is so broken, we should nix it altogether.

Try reading past the word wrap some day. The real argument is whether copyright can be saved from the lobbyists. This is a special case of whether democracy can be saved from the lobbyists, but that topic is too broad to lead to constructive discussion.

I've seen a consistency. They are for Fair Use and against using DRM and other means which eliminate Fair Use. Taking someone else's work and selling it for profit is not Fair Use. But there is also a cheer when people do stupid stuff in general with copyright because it gets more stories out there the general public might run across that would show how stupid copyright is at the moment, even if in this particular case they are still wrong.

Recipes do not fall under copyright (at least the list of ingredients and quantities). They can't directly copy your layout and can't copy any artwork or photography associated with the recipe, but the recipe itself is fair game.

Being on the web has nothing to do with public domain. It should be obvious to anyone that something being on the internet does not make it public domain. Such a claim is beyond ignorant.

It's a bit more than that; The recipe; including the procedure; isn't copyrightable though the specific representation may be. If the text is just exactly a representation of the recipe then it won't be. If you put some artistic input in; say describing how the mix will taste at one moment; telling a story of the history in another; then that whole description will be copyrightable. Of course; details and boundaries vary from place to place.

To be fair, we weren't so opposed to the RIAA before they started framing people and using falsified evidence to extort large sums of money out of people.

Additionally, there is no internal inconsistency in the stances we've got. While some are calling for full abolition of IP, the more common complaint is that it's prone to abuse and the rewards are grossly out of line with the actual harm done leaving some organizations like the RIAA to use it instead of normal business tactics.

Most people make a clear distinction between personal use (an activity which is entirely legal in jurisdictions such as mine) and business models based on systematic use of others' work without permission or compensation.

Evidently you don't make that distinction, hence your tendency to treat the two issues as one and then claim that everyone else is being hypocritical.

No more than putting something in print (where technology has existed for some time allowing people to freely copy and redistribute your work) involves giving up control of it. Just because it's easy to do something doesn't mean it's moral or should be legal to do so.

Now a lot of people know who they are, so points for Slashdot giving them free advertising, as well as anybody else who clicked through to such an obvious "HEY LOOK AT ME EVERYBODY." Look for a statement of contrition and a re-launch with original content (which they probably already have on the backburner).

Well, if you had read the article or followed the links, you'd see that the article in question isn't just a recipe. It's a researched article about the history of apple pie, including two medieval recipes, with commentary and a bibliography. No question that it's more than a list of ingredients with instructions.

Um, yeah. Did you? The part about "substantial literary expression" perhaps? A list of ingredients and instructions for using them, just like rules for games or instructions for building a bird house do not generally qualify as "substantial literary expression" and generally are not completely "original works of authorship", and thus enjoy significantly decreased copyright protection.

Gather them together as a collected work, and the total work enjoys much more copyright protection, but the individual recipe

What will end up happening is everyone will make a huge deal out of this. The case will go before the supreme court or find it's way into congress and the Riaa/MPAA will use it to pass even harsher copyright law under the guise of protecting the 'little guy'. Then we are all more screwed than before.

Better check those straps on the tinfoil hat. Seems like something is blocking your cerebral circulation.

Yeah. Some people have claimed that Slashdot's response is being hypocritical, however, the key differences are:

MPAA/RIAA sues individual who downloads a song for personal use for $insane_amount per track/video. Person in question did not engage in any commercial activity related to the downloaded item.Some magazine steals a woman's article (not just the recipe, but the whole article word for word) and commences to use it as part of a commercial product (their magazine). Original author requests a $130 donation to a college and is denied.

as how they responded. They were rude and insulting and she just asked for a donation to a local college. To respond in the way they did anyone would be upset and, out of principal, take legal action. They could have just said, sure we'll make the $130 donation and be happy, but they had to insult her instead. The magazine should donate 10 times the amount and fire the editor.

What is even worse is the discussions that are going on the magazines Facebook page. Someone posted her actual address (taken down) to homophobic AIDS filled rants. I know it might seem odd but maybe the editor legimately thought the Internet was public domain and is now paying for her mistake. But the personal attacks is just childish

Your effort to learn how to do something and how to convey that information and the time and expense actually to convey the information is worth nothing to you? No matter how much it's worth at retail?

That's fine.

Print this out and sign it:

I, (insert your real name here), hereby donate all prior, current, and future works created by me to the public domain in perpetuity.Signed, ___________Dated _____________

Then have it notarized and mail it to the US Copyright office.

Go ahead. You said copyright meant nothing, make it legal as well as practical.